‘Facebook rapist’ jailed for NSW attacks

A NSW man has been jailed for at least 30 years after befriending teenage girls and young women on Facebook and other social media sites and then sexually assaulting them.

Andrew James Benn, 29, raped or indecently assaulted 14 teenagers and young women he met on social media, including Facebook, Tinder and Snapchat, between September 2012 and January 2017.

Newcastle District Court judge Roy Ellis on Thursday jailed Benn – who’d pleaded guilty to 33 charges including 21 counts of sexual intercourse without consent – for a total of 40 years with a non-parole period of 30 years.

Judge Ellis said the way a “depraved” Benn had treated his victims was “nothing short of despicable”. The judge described his enormous criminality as “evil”.

Benn would trawl through personal Facebook pages of random young women in the NSW Hunter region searching for victims and sending them friend requests.

After befriending them, Benn would gain their confidence, and then arrange to meet in person before attacking them.

In one case, Benn, from Rothbury in the Hunter Valley, sent a Facebook friend request to a 17-year-old girl in November 2013 and spent weeks chatting to her online until he convinced the teenager to meet him.

The year 11 student told Benn she’d never been on a date before. She thought he was going to drive her into Newcastle but, instead, he took her to a boat ramp at Morpeth in Maitland and raped her in the back seat.

Benn then drove the terrified girl to the Morpeth cemetery where he raped her again.

In an emotional victim impact statement read to the court, the woman revealed she’d been ashamed of what Benn had done to her.

At the time she felt she couldn’t tell anyone about being raped – including her mother.

“I was still in shock. I was worried about how my mother would react,” the woman told the court on Thursday.

She suffered panic attacks, nightmares and flashbacks after the attack and subsequently failed year 11. She didn’t return to school.

Another victim told the court she hated herself every day because she froze when Benn attacked her and didn’t fight back.

Benn was arrested in January 2017 after two teenage girls and three women aged between 16 and 20 contacted police to report he’d sexually assaulted them.

A further nine victims came forward following publicity about his arrest.

Dickeson has walked from Gympie District Court, after a judge referred to limitations on his sentencing power.

Dickeson, 43, had been diagnosed as socially inept and fantasy ridden and also had multiple personality disorder, Judge Long noted in his sentencing remarks.

He was being dealt with after he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent treatment of a boy, 12, by photographing him with Dickeson’s partly undressed then partner, former Gympie nurse Kaja Francesca Drake.

Dickeson also pleaded guilty to possessing a substantial collection of child pornography, 12 charges of failing to report contact with children as required by a court order and two of breaching a young girl’s privacy by making secret recordings of her.

He ordered Dickeson be on probation for three years, with another sentence of three-and-a-half years suspended to hang over his head for five years.

UPDATE: DECEMBER 2015

Dickeson has been sentenced to jail for failing to comply with his reporting conditions. He had befriended four children when he moved to the Gympie area & used text, Snapchat, online gaming & Facebook to communicate with them. He will be released on April 8, 2016.

Qld paedophile’s sentence upheld

A paedophile’s 10 year jail term for molesting two young sisters was upheld despite Queensland’s Court of Appeal conceding his home videos of the sexual abuse were “stomach turning”.

Andrew Mark Hugh Dickeson, 29, was ordered to complete eight years of the 10 year sentence before being eligible to apply for parole when he was sentenced in the District Court in Brisbane last December.

Dickeson, a computer installer for Queensland Police, pleaded guilty to four charges including two of maintaining a sexual relationship with a child.

He had a brief relationship with the two mothers of the three girls before sexually abusing the daughters aged six to eight.

Dickeson had a sexual relationship with one of the eight year olds.

The abuse only came to light because it was recorded on video and concealed on Dickeson’s computer.

Court of Appeal President Margaret McMurdo said the videotapes Dickeson took of his sex romps with the girls while he was babysitting them were “stomach turning”.

They included the girls performing in a seductive manner, doing a strip tease and rubbing oil into each other before wrestling naked.

Director of Public Prosecutions Leanne Clare had asked for a 15 year jail term.

The Court of Appeal also dismissed an application by Dickeson’s legal team to cut the sentence to eight and a half years.

Former police service employee jailed for 10 years

A Queensland police service employee has been jailed for 10 years for sexually abusing and making shocking videos of sisters aged eight and six.

Andrew Mark Hugh Dickeson, 29, was obsessed with young girls and had 800 photos he had taken in public places of children stored on his computer.

He had brief sexual relationships with two mothers of three girls before sexually abusing the daughters, and having penetrative sex with the eight-year-old.

Dickeson, a computer installer, pleaded guilty in the District Court in Brisbane to two counts of maintaining a sexual relationship with a child and one count each of indecent treatment and possessing child abuse computer games between January and October last year.

In sentencing Dickeson, Judge Julie Dick said he had lavished attention on the children and seduced them without resorting to threats or violence.

“This was a case of cold and calculated seduction of these children into debauchery,” Judge Dick said.

She said Dickeson still had little understanding of the damage he had done to the children, with the two sisters, aged eight and six, suffering appalling consequences.